The image viewer is available in several editions including a portable version and an installer. It supports multiple languages and is completely free for personal use. The main interface of the software looks a bit cluttered and very colorful at first glance. Especially the two icon bars at the top of the window can cause some confusion at the beginning. It is possible to make changes to the skin but not the the interface itself. The designs itself looks professionally done and the three program windows for browsing folders, previewing images and thumbnails are intuitive to use after all.

A click on a thumbnail image will display a larger preview of that image in the preview window in the left sidebar. A left-click in that preview window will zoom in on the image. It is even possible to move around with the mouse as long as the left mouse button is pressed.

FastStone Image Viewer comes with an assortment of image editing tools. Not as much as image editing software programs like Paint.net, Gimp or even Adobe Photoshop offer but enough to perform the most common image editing operations like resizing, rotating, cropping, changing colors, brightness or contrasts or removing red eye effects.

There are also options to perform batch operations like converting or resizing multiple image formats at once. A handful of other interesting modules are available that include the ability to create slideshows, remove JPEG metadata, change timestamps or compare images. The program supports file tagging and is a solid program for these kinds of tasks.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.0 is a fast comfortable image viewer that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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Fast Picture Viewer Professional was primarily designed for photographers, designer and editors to aid them in their daily work but its core functionality makes it interesting for most computer owners as well. As the name suggests the application is a fast picture viewer with a low memory footprint. Here is but one example for that.

A 2.17 Megabyte jpg image that is loaded into Fast Picture Viewer uses 9.6 Megabytes of computer memory and 12.6 Megabytes of virtual memory. The very same image makes XNView use 48.5 Megabytes of computer memory and 44.6 Megabytes of virtual memory.

The image file formats compatibility page lists the file formats that are currently supported by Fast Picture Viewer. It does make use of the Windows Imaging Component to ensure maximum file format compatibility.

There are a few basic groups that Fast Picture Viewer aims at:

Professional Photographers

• Full Color Management with Profiled Monitor Support
• Plug and Play Tethered Shooting
• Adobe XMP Rating, Microsoft Photo Rating
• Histogram and EXIF Info
• Color-Managed Raw Preview
• Sort on Date or GPS Time
• Watched Folder Mode

Imaging Professionals

• Unmatched Speed
• Browse 100,000’s
• Large Images Support
• Saved Bookmarks
• Multipage MTIFF Support
• Custom Monitor Profiles
• One Key Accept/Reject/Copy
• Deep Subfolder Browsing

And of course the home user who wants a fast reliable image viewer for the images on his computer.

The program’s options contain several features that have to be enabled before they can be used. This includes one-key rating of images, single-keystroke labeling, multi-core support or how file operations like copying or moving are handled.

You will discover interesting and useful new functions all the time at the beginning. A click on the image count of the folder in the lower right corner will for instance display a slider that can be used to jump directly to another image with just two clicks of the mouse button.

Another example is the folder tracking feature which automatically scans selected folders – and subfolders – for new images displaying them as soon as they become available.

Fast Picture Viewer Professional is one of the fastest image viewers out there. Combined with its low memory footprint and professional features it is currently one of the best image viewers that is available for the Windows platform.

To get your copy head straight over to the download section and download the software. Then register the software with the following information. (Make sure to put the key in one line)

username: gHacks.net
key: LPmFPNAcSb4If92TCNGny9qrqLjGfRhz1=qf4C9F4qF=fiW+9SQP10zW9TJpewmPgzTKs8kYNEXb8lAly3fG

The key can be used to register the software so that it becomes the Pro version. This is working from Sunday 10:00 UTC to Monday 10:00 UTC.

So hurry up and let the software developer know what you think of his software.

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Format plugins will add support for image formats that are not included in the main release. About 35 image format plugins can be downloaded from that page. Most of them are exotic formats like jng, wic or bmf which most users probably never heard before.

The plugins can be downloaded separately or as a plugin pack and have to be unpacked into the XnView plugin directory where they will be automatically recognized by the image viewer.

Add-ons on the other hand add support for external services like Imageshack, Nero, archive or ftp support. It usually means sending pictures to another application or adding new functions in XnView like viewing images in archives or adding basic image editing support.

The add-ons and format plugins add new features and functions to XnView which could be interesting for some users.

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Importing new photos into the application can be done easily. The user can use the navigation pane on the top left side of the application to select folders that contain images from his hard drive or use the Import function to pick folders that way. Photos that get imported are automatically categorized and sorted. It is for example possible to browse the photos by year after importing them.

Some categories like the rating category are empty at the beginning and will be filled when the user begins rating photos in the library. One interesting category is to view the images by equipment model which would be really great for photographers who use different equipment for different purposes.

Other options include to view photos by copyright holders, software, exposure time, flash and about a dozen more categories.

Images can be viewed as thumbnails, image strips, slideshows, single images, flip-book like or on a map that is showing their geographic location. This photo software has so many functions that it is hard to keep an overview over all of them.

One feature that is missing are those basic image editing functions that most other image viewers posses. It is not possible to resize an image and save it on the computer afterwards.

Pictomio raises the bar for other image viewers with its beautiful interface and image viewing functions. It does lack behind in image editing options and suffers a little bit from the amount of functions and features the developers have packed into the interface.

There is another drawback. Beauty has its price and users who like Pictomio simply because of its looks will have to cope with a much higher computer memory consumption as in related image viewers.

Pictomia is available for Windows XP and Windows Vista in version 1.0 and as technology preview version 1.1 which includes the Pictgeo software add-on which adds geotagging to the photo viewer.

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The author Axel was so nice to send me registration keys for his software program that can be used to turn the free version into the professional version. The professional version supports additional file types which was my only criticism in the previous review.

If you want to grab a registration key for Fast Picture Viewer reply in here with a comment and I send them to anyone who is commenting as long as I have some. The keys are good for one machine only and require activation over the Internet.

That’s a great chance of getting the fastest image viewer out there for free. What are you waiting for?

Update: Keys are out! I send out lots of them and hope everyone who received one has a good experience and writes about it here or directly to the author.

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There was virtually no delay when viewing those images which I have always experienced before. Each image viewer that I tried had a small delay when displaying those large 4 Megabyte+ images.

Startup is very quick as well. Fast Picture Viewer comes with a slick design and runs on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and most likely Windows Server 2008 as well.

While designed with speed in mind Fast Picture Viewer has several additional interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of image viewers. The basics first. Users can integrate the software program in the shell, make it the default image viewer for file types and load files directly from within the interface.

The mouse wheel scrolls the images of the directory forward or backward and a click zooms into the image. Several keyboard shortcuts are available for mouse-less navigation. It has a Keep / Copy Folder function that provides a great method of copying selected images to that folder with just the keyboard.

The software program supports both Adobe XMP and Windows Vista metadata creation and update which fuels a rating feature where users can rate images on the fly.

The only thing that might keep someone from using Fast Picture Viewer is its lack of support of image formats. The free for personal use edition supports the JPEG format (*.jpeg, *.jpg, *.jpe, *.jfif, *.exif) and Microsoft HD Photo (*.hdp, *.wdp) / JPEG-XR while the professional version adds support for other common file types like png, tiff, bmp and RAW format previewing and is sold for $29.99 which is a reasonable price for such a fast software.

Another point of criticism could be that it concentrates solely on image viewing and that it does not offer image organizing or editing features. I do not need and miss those features on the other hand but some users might.

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A click on an image loads an image viewer that resembles normal image viewers. Images can be dragged and dropped between folders and in a casket that can contain images from all folders. The casket is a virtual folder that can be used to create a custom slideshow for instance. Images can not only be imported from the local computer but also from Flickr. Images that are displayed can also be uploaded to Flickr.

The size of the thumbnails in the boards can be changed from tiny to a size that only displays one image at a time. Boards can be viewed separately as well. Twin Visions does not only offer image viewing functions but also image editing and sharing functions.

The image editor is not comparable to Photoshop or GIMP but it does offer a few quick fixes. It’s possible to remove noise, the red eye effect or fix the brightness with a mouse click. Effects can be added like blur or color effects. The current beta version will stop working on October 1st, 2008 and it is very likely that this could become a commercial software.

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It comes with all the features that I need, it can resize images, change formats, display and create thumbnails, batch convert images and all the standard functions of an image viewer like zooming, fullscreen, color changing and the like. The most popular image formats are supported and many functions and features can be enabled and changed in the options.

My first change for instance was to add the next and previous image navigation to the mouse wheel. You can really configure the software the way you like it. It might take a while to add and remove functions from the toolbars and set all shortcuts the way you want them but once that is done you have the fastest image viewer currently available at your disposal.

Imagine did replace Xnview on my system. , the image viewer that I have used for the last year.

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If you hang out at these sites you should definitely consider trying and using Piclens to enhance your viewing experience. Piclens adds a little ‘play’ icon in the lower left corner of every image which starts the full screen image viewer showing the selected image in full screen mode.

It is then possible to navigate the images using your mouse or the cursor keys. A slideshow has been implemented as well which displays all images one after the other.

A click on the > icon in the top left corner loads the website the image is hosted on which could be different from the website that you started Piclens with.

Piclens supports multi-page search results when you use it to view images at Google Images or Yahoo images. Basically a way to browse all pictures at once without the need to click to load the next batch of results.

Read More:

Piclens Homepage

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Just right-click the link and select the application that you want to use to view it from the menu. Launchy, that is the name of the Firefox add-on, supports more than 60 applications right out of the box with the ability to add more applications using an XML file.

It is possible to disable programs that have been found and are selectable in the right-click menu.

If you for instance want to view the source you have the option to use Ultraedit, Notepad, Open Office or Wordpad which is pure overkill. It is convenient to remove all but one program unless you really use more than one source viewer.

I personally can see two great applications for Launchy. The first is for webmasters who like to test websites in several browsers. The second is for users who would like to open media files in external applications and for users who like to send images right into their image editing software.

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Has most of the features that programs like irfanview have, like thumbnailed view, manipulate settings like brightness and size, flip images and adjust colors. Best of all, its free and fast to use. An alternative to irfanview and xnview.

[tags]image, viewer, convert, graphic, grafik, irfanview, xnview, forcevision, manipulate[/tags]

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homepage

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